Over the last few months, you may have noticed the Meebo Bar gracing the bottom of some Web sites, mostly large blogs, or other similar big content sites. That's because previously, the Meebo Bar was only available to select partners, so the little guys were mostly shut out. Now, Meebo is making the Meebo Bar available for all Web sites, with a specific focus on blogs.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Meebo Bar, it's a JavaScript plug-in that sits at the bottom of Web pages. It enables a lot of different social interaction and sharing features, such as displaying a specific stream of tweets, promoting a Facebook fan page, as well as Stumbling or Digging the page. The Meebo Bar also allows users to chat with their friends through the IM platform that made Meebo famous. Additionally, the Meebo Bar enables easy sharing of content on the page through its very slick Meebo Share Dock.
The bar is extremely easy to set up on blogs, especially TypePad, self-hosted Wordpress, Blogger, and Moveable Type, all of which have preconfigured solutions, built by Meebo. For those with other setups, the installation just consists of inserting a code snippit, something to which we have become very accustomed. Users can customize which features appear on their Meebo Bar all on Bar.meebo.com. The changes are then pushed out to the installation on your site in a matter of minutes.
Users can customize the Meebo Bar for their site with a variety of buttons.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)This version of the Meebo Bar, for everyone, includes all of the same features that it offers to its partner sites, which is something that they were really shooting for with this release, Daniel Bernstein, Meebo's director of business development tells CNET. Meebo Bar users get all of the features of the bar, as well as detailed sharing analytics to see how people are using it, all for the low, low price of...free.
The Meebo Bar is a really great way of enabling a lot of different types of sharing and content interaction very quickly and easily. The sharing that results could, potentially, be a big driver of traffic back to sites. It's really great to see this rich functionality being adapted into to a "self-serve" type of system. With so many more possible installs out there, the Meebo Bar should see a huge explosion in growth.
Meebo's Share Dock pops out when you drag a piece of content on an enabled site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)
Facebook has instructed Meebo to temporarily take down its newly implemented Facebook Chat integration. According to Meebo, Facebook would like them to, "...connect to their network in a different way." Facebook has committed developers from Chat and Facebook Connect to help Meebo get Facebook Chat up and working on the service again.
To be clear, Facebook is in no way discouraging Meebo from integrating Facebook Chat into its service; it's just asking Meebo to hook-in through a new and most likely more secure method. Facebook has a history of cracking down on unauthorized uses of their data or services. Most notably, we saw Facebook ask Plaxo to stop scraping their data. It's definitely a step in the right direction that Facebook is helping Meebo find a secure solution to Chat integration.
The official response from Meebo is below.
As a bunch of you already know (because you've been using it), we recently added Facebook Chat into Meebo.We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they'd like us to connect to their network in a different way. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we said "okay."
However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo "really, really soon."
Work began this week, so stay tuned. We expect some all nighters on both sides!
This is going to be a great move for Meebo. They are expanding their reach and providing their services to new users. A lot of sites can benefit from real-time user interaction like this, and Meebo is right here to fulfill that need.
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